Students will still have to face teachers and their dirty looks, but books may soon become a thing of the past.

In Arizona, the Vail Unified School District will open the doors of Empire High School, the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public high school, this fall.

Of course, students will still have to drag their butts to class, and teachers still need to draft up lesson plans, but textbooks will be sacked in favor of electronic and online articles, the Arizona Daily Star reports.

About 350 students will be loaned laptops (cost: $850 a pop) for the duration of the school year. District officials hope to eventually increase the enrollment number to 750.

In Tuscon's neighboring school district, home to 60,000 students, 300 SMART Board interactive drawing boards will be installed in math and English classrooms for multimedia lessons, allowing teachers to exceed the limitations of old-school tools like overhead projectors.

Calvin Baker, superintendent of Vail Unified School District, told the Star electronic materials will drive teachers away from just "marching through a textbook" every year. However, since the plan is still in the beginning stages, Baker notes that he "doesn't really know for sure" how it will work.

"I'm sure there are going to be some adjustments, but we visited other schools using laptops, and [those] schools were just more engaged than non-laptop schools," Baker said.

One advantage to the electronic textbook is that it will have the most consistent, up-to-date information.

The wireless-laptop revolution appears to be trickling down. The program Freedom to Learn — originally called Learning Without Limits — provides laptop computers to more than 20,000 students and 1,400 teachers, according to the AP. Also, Burton Middle School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, implemented a laptop program in 2002, and the curriculum has rejuvenated both students and teachers.

"I've been teaching for a lot of years and I've never seen students work so well as I am seeing now," Sandee Lowthian, a 51-year-old fifth-grade teacher, told The Associated Press. "I am so excited about the students learning that it's really hard for me to even think about retiring [now]."

Others forms of technology have found a home in the classroom as well. In 2004, Duke University handed out 20GB Apple iPods to 1,650 students in its freshman class as part of a costly yearlong experiment (see "Duke University Spends Big Dough To Give Students Free iPods").